


Rosie and Her One (1) Miscommunication

by A_Tired_Writer



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Domestic, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, How is that not a tag, I am going to place so much more emphasis on the 'comfort', M/M, Parentlock, Well fuck you parentlock is the entire plot of this, they have suffered enough
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:00:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25396555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Tired_Writer/pseuds/A_Tired_Writer
Summary: John did his best to not curse around his five-year-old daughter, and most of the time, he succeeded. But then there was the infinitely unknowable problem of Sherlock Holmes, who seemed to always have something up the sleeve of his charcoal-grey Belstaff.It was that exact curly-haired problem that caused John his current strife.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 8
Kudos: 115





	Rosie and Her One (1) Miscommunication

**Author's Note:**

> This is both ludicrously fluffy and angsty and romantic SO if you want, like, whiplash, this is the place you go to. This is technically set in 2020, because Rosie, born in 2015, is five years old, but I WILL NOT be including corona because that bitch has been breathing down my neck for the past five-ish months and what is the point of this if not escapism! 
> 
> ;-;
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy! :( <3

Life is not kind.

In and of itself, it is not a hard lesson to learn; as an infant, you hurt in the slightest, and you cry; as a child, you stumble and scrape your knee, and you cry; as a teenager, you hurt for all you think is misunderstood about your truest self, and you cry. For this, life is not sorry, for life is not kind.

Only a select few learn that life is cruel.

You experience the ground-shattering thunder of a firearm going off for the first time, and you are unable to sleep for days; you lose a loved one, feel their death in your soul as if the death were yours, and you are unable to find that piece once more; you say the wrong thing, have a bad thought, and suddenly you are the bringer of your own demise—the causer of your own destruction.

Rarer than the victims of life are those who turn their back on life’s cruelty.

You spend days or weeks in the darkened sorrow of your loss, yet you learn that some of the prettiest flowers grow in the shade; you lay your head down on a pillow that embraces your thought-leaden skull with familiarity, but you’ve learned what songs sound best in the dark; you are scarred and bruised from your skin to your soul, yet you will find an artist, skilled or amateur, who uses your wounds as if they were brushstrokes or letters in a language only they know.

Rarer still are the victims of life who find each other.

Perhaps that is the beauty of them, the ever-hungry veteran doctor and the deceivingly fragile detective; in their cores, they are survivors, with mismatching wounds and jagged, venomous edges. They bare the scars of different battles, and yet, within each other, a mirror is found—a reflection of that which is loveable on equal grounds with that which is evil.

It was John Watson and Sherlock Holmes that life had treated cruelly, and it was those same two who would not be bested by its irrepressible bloodlust.

~

John did his best to not curse around his five-year-old daughter.

Most of the time, he succeeded.

When Rosie had still been a baby, John had had precisely a month of leeway to unlearn his Army-brand curses, and he’d used it well. He had snuffed certain words out completely, turned them into child-friendly variants, or substituted them with incoherent grunts that sounded vaguely like the verbal contraband he wished so desperately to avoid.

But then there was the infinitely unknowable problem of Sherlock Holmes, who seemed to always have something up the sleeve of his charcoal-grey Belstaff.

It was that exact curly-haired problem that caused John his current strife.

So, no, upon the sight of Sherlock hanging like a bat from the same spot a mannequin had once been mock-hanged, John was not proud to invoke the name of God. In his defence, shock of the Sherlock variety did terrible things for his filter.

“ _What_ are you doing?” John held up the hand that was not busy holding Rosie to his hip; she’d tripped up the stairs the other day, so for now, he would carry her. “No. No, don’t answer that.”

“Hello, John,” Sherlock said, too unbothered for John’s blood pressure. “Rosie. I trust you did well at that sorry excuse for an institution.”

Rosie beamed while her father considered the murder of his flatmate. “Sherlock!”

A disastrous thud sounded from behind John. With a hand braced at the back of Rosie’s head and his feet planting themselves firmly in anticipation, John looked back to see . . .

Sherlock in a lump.

It was absurd to think this was typical.

And yet.

“Okay, no, _what_ are you doing?”

But Sherlock was already up and moving to the kitchen in a flutter of blue fabric and mussed hair. John thought he said, “He couldn’t have been tied to the bridge that long, the cord wouldn’t have lasted . . .”

“Case?”

“Lestrade told me the entire department had been unable to make a break. I thought we had a serial killer on our hands. God, at least some sort of sadistic deviant.” Sherlock looked at him sidelong, dejected and worn down like a librarian that hadn’t seen their bed in weeks. “John, this is hardly a _three._ ”

John, not unsympathetic to the disappointment of an underwhelming case, hummed as he set Rosie down on his designated armchair. She relaxed into the back like the queen of a prosperous kingdom. John thought his heart would break in its inability to contain all the love he had for her. Being the mere mortal that he was, unable to paint a message in the stars and give his Rosie her own constellation, John gently grabbed her head—how was she so small when her smile was so _big?_ —and kissed her forehead.

“Maybe he was trying to do you a favour?” John asked as he approached the opposite side of the kitchen table. They should start calling it something else, like a lab bench, because the last time this surface had seen food, there had been someone else on England’s throne.

“By giving me this? He’d do more good for us all by putting a _bullet_ in my skull.”

Sherlock looked up at John’s silence. Whatever he saw made him follow up with, “Perhaps not a bullet then.”

“He’s trying to keep you on your feet.”

“I can assure you, my feet are fine.”

Patience. Patience was a skill John learned for parenthood. He was running low on it, and every ounce had been wasted by this fool in the pretty housecoat.

God help him.

Sherlock peered at him over the black crescents of his microscope. With a sort of raspberry of breath, he let his head roll once before positioning it back before the eyepiece. “I will let Lestrade know this his . . . efforts were . . .” Sherlock’s lips curled in a grimace. “ _Appreciated._ ”

John turned away before his half-smile could show, but knowing Sherlock, such trivialities were useless.

Rosie came running up to Sherlock in her nimble manner, tripping only once—but it was enough to send John’s heart into a frenzy. He couldn’t tell what she was trying—

Sherlock was bending down swiftly, swinging her up onto his lap and appraising her like a particularly interesting piece of evidence.

“Who tried to give you flowers?”

John took that moment to sit down. “ _What?”_

His little girl? Flowers? Other children _giving her flowers?_ Yes—yes, the stool was a necessity indeed.

“Grass stains on the wrists of her sleeves—but she always has these, so it only indicates she’d been outside; dirt under less than half her finger nails—she was either messy during her recess or the flowers she’d gotten were still attached at the root; petal stuck—here.” Sherlock had plucked a small white petal from behind Rosie’s ear, presenting it like it would be the damning flower that sent her to jail. “So. Once more, Miss Watson, because I might be accused of playing favourite’s when you’re involved: Who tried to give you flowers?”

Rosie was properly scolded—or embarrassed, judging the way she was fiddling with Sherlock’s housecoat. John thought there wasn’t a more perfect sight in the world; his daughter, all golden hair and light pinks and greys in her clothes, sat in the lap of his . . . Sherlock, all sleek blacks and blues and browns.

His Sherlock.

Well.

That was a thought.

He’d think about it later. Whatever the hell _later_ meant.

“She’s just a girl in my class,” Rosie murmured. “Didn’t think much of it.”

“Well? What’s her name?”

“Lily.”

John loved the feeling of smiling when it was Rosie bringing it out of him; these smiles, for his daughter and the man that may or may not be _his Sherlock_ , were beautiful and precious and real in every sense of the word. Sometimes it was hard to remember what a real smile felt like when you told yourself the fake ones were what you should wear. “Did she give you a rose?”

“John, please, where would the child have found a rose in the school’s playground?”

Rosie bent her neck back to look at John. Sherlock’s hand instinctively reached out to keep her hair from touching whatever he had on the table. It looked like . . . a stomach.

No, as a doctor, he could say with certainty that that was indeed a stomach.

This was his life. Joy.

Odd that he didn’t mind in the slightest, though.

“Actually,” Rosie sang, “she clipped it from her mum’s garden when her mum wasn’t looking. She didn’t bring the bush or anything, she just thought that keeping the root in soil would protect in on the way here.” John was, perhaps, a little smug when he looked at Sherlock. _Ha! Wrong._ Sherlock had a little splash of murder in his eyes, but it was mostly par for the course. He was like a dog with the knowledge that a bone had been thrown and no way to chase it. Rosie was oblivious to them, continuing, “Said something about Willbun Shake-a-spear and roses. I just liked the flower.”

Murderous tendencies temporarily shelved in the name of Rosie, Sherlock grinned something secret and worth protecting while she rocked her head back and forth in the unshakable bracket of his hand. “William Shakespeare,” he corrected.

“I think I’d remember a name as stupid as that.”

John had a matching grin pressed into his fingers as he watched Rosie fail to whistle a song she’d picked up last week. Sherlock was patient with her, not scolding her for potentially getting hair on the disembodied stomach. Not even John was ignorant enough to mislabel that blooming sensation in his chest; there was little else to call it when he saw one piece of his soul holding the other.

“This is good. You’re already learning to disregard the unimportant. Soon we’ll start on your mince palace.”

“Sherlock.”

The detective sighed in defeat. “Fine. We’ll start with a mind playhouse, if you think her so incapable.”

“Sherlock!”

Rosie sat up straight, and John knew there were stars in her eyes that made “no” seem like the hardest word to say in the world. “Does this mean I won’t have to take tests when I’m older? I don’t like tests. What are they for? I remember things now, and then what?”

Sherlock looked so endlessly _pleased_ that John knew it could stand no longer. He was around the table in record speed, taking back his daughter as if somehow Sherlock would weaponize her against John himself.

Seeing the twin mischief in their eyes, he’d say he’d gotten there just in time.

“You two . . . Trouble.” He pointed an accusatory finger at Sherlock before glancing down at his daughter. “You’re both _trouble._ ”

“This is hardly news.”

Hiding Rosie’s face in his shoulder, John made a vulgar gesture at Sherlock with his free hand. Sherlock did not disappoint in his response.

Well, no one said anything about curse _gestures,_ right?

“Pa?”

John stared into Rosie’s face, bumping his nose against hers. “Right here, rose bud.”

Fake deaths and drug problems notwithstanding, John had known Sherlock for the better part of a decade. He knew when those eyes, coloured like the London sky, were pinned on him, even when he couldn’t see it for himself. It was the same in reverse—there was no one in all of the world who knew him like Sherlock Holmes did.

“Pa, can you help me wash my hands? There _is_ dirt under them.”

John kissed her cheek, much to the half-hearted dismay of Rosie. “’Course.”

~

It was rare, this. Rare, but routine and lovely and harmoniously quiet.

The two of them, in their seats, as if they couldn’t fathom being anywhere else in the world.

London moving around them in a constant whirlwind of car exhaust and drunken hollering and whispered rumours.

Sherlock Holmes, curled up in his metal-bracketed armchair, sleek and comfortable wrapped up into one piece of furniture. The metal was permanently stained with an acid on the left side, hidden from view unless it was searched for, the acid itself only lightly corrosive. It was in the shape of John’s hand, and the set of circumstances that led to the aforementioned hand-shaped stain—

are for another day.

John Watson, leaned back in his fabric-bound armchair that was worn at the armrests from his constant touch. The throw blanket had changed once, three years ago. It smelled like something distinctly Sherlock—probably it had been in one spill or another, and his aftershave dropped onto it. John would have been a little more upset about the change, in _one more thing_ he couldn’t keep, but—

not every change was a bad one.

These used to be their islands, with the small space between them to hold everything they didn’t want and everything they couldn’t have. Small ships with the cargo of their desire passed by in well-travelled routes, but they were never allowed to unload, to share and relish and love.

But at one point since the death of a wife, the multiple breakings of several hearts, the remoulding of trusts and love and companionship, they had visited the islands that weren’t theirs. A proud flag flew in the sky of John’s; humanity was etched into the sands of Sherlock’s.

It was, perhaps, with this realization, that John wanted to play the part of a god that could write his love into the stars. He wanted to rise with his bones of branches and his flesh of leaves and reach out across this oceanic canyon, this chasm that lived to separate them in one way or another.

He’d had enough. Years of—of everything, and suddenly waiting, sitting on his hands, had become too much.

So John stood, and he braced his foot in the ocean, waiting to watch himself disintegrate into the roiling waters.

He did no such thing.

And so he took another step.

One, two more—

Until his knees were up against a stiff, dark leather; until he felt metal beams dig into his shins; until he saw the imperfect skies of the heavens in eyes that never stopped moving, calculating, thinking.

Except for when they were on John. Because then they slowed to an appreciative roam, an apprehensive pensiveness that belonged, unexpectedly, to the world’s sole consulting detective.

Sherlock had long since trained himself out of the habit of looking for certain things in John’s expression; it had been a passing comment, but for their first few cases, Sherlock had said he’d been waiting for the words “freak” or “fool” or “fake” to show itself in the lines of John’s brow or the quirk of his lip.

John had said something about only one f-word being allowed in the house, and that it was “fun, in case you get any ideas in that gorgeous head of yours.” Sherlock had laughed, and it had been glorious.

They’d let the “gorgeous” pass without comment. It hadn’t seemed productive to point it out.

But now John wanted to say it, over and over and over until the letters were scrawled into the pale planes of Sherlock’s shoulders, over his heart, the dip of his throat. Sherlock looked eager to play canvas.

“I think we’re both idiots.”

“Do take care to not lump me into your normalcy.”

John wanted so _badly_ to flick him in the forehead. He might try and do it sneakily later. “You,” he said, forcing down a laugh and mostly failing, “are an insufferable sod, and I hope your scarfs all go up in flames.”

“I know.”

Who had moved first? John hadn’t been keeping track, but his knees were braced against Sherlock’s thighs and lightly scarred hands were secured somewhere on his back.

No, not somewhere; right behind the dip of his waist.

Because Sherlock’s touches were not _something_ to be felt _somewhere_ at _some time_. They were gems and they were gold and they were brushes of flame that left scars John loved to bear.

Sherlock’s hands—they were just below the centre of his back, where his spine began to curve inwards.

“You are a marvel,” Sherlock breathed in a way that meant he wasn’t thinking about filtering his words.

It was the best thing John had ever learned about him, in this moment.

John was a man of dignity, even if he was of the variety who went weak in the knees for dark-haired, light-eyed geniuses who looked at him like he was the answer to an unasked question; he smiled terribly wide despite his efforts to stifle it, looking at the mostly closed window at the black-blue-gold streets of London under twilight.

“I thought this would be more awkward.”

 _Nice,_ John thought to himself. _Want to throw yourself down the stairs while you’re at it? Might save yourself from worlds of embarrassment!_

Sherlock, the unflappable bastard, was unfazed. “I have learned to expect only you from you.”

“You’ve veered from the lane of poeticism into the lane of incoherency, Sherlock.”

Sherlock smiled. “Yes, it would seem the articulation of my emotions is still a ways from being . . . desirable. What I mean is that . . . I only expect you to be John. I do not want you to be John Watson, honourably discharged soldier, or John Watson, widower, or John Watson, unwitting partner to the world’s most annoying professional, if it is not what you want to show me. You are the one that matters the most, in whatever manner . . . you are willing to give . . . yourself . . . to . . . me . . . ?” Sherlock scrunched up his nose, the other wonderfully aged lines of his face following, like little paths to mark what they’ve seen, where they’ve been, how they’ve felt and on what scale. “That was terrible. I think you should strike me for that.”

John _tsked_ good-naturedly. “I’ll do no such thing.” He leaned forward, pressing his forehead against Sherlock’s, and simply . . . _breathed_ as he felt leanly coiled arms tighten around his middle. “Though I do think I’ll hide your stash of microscope slides.”

Sherlock pulled back quickly, glowering in a way that had John wrestling back a smile. “Cut off my arm instead. I can work without that. Not the slides.”

Loving him was the only possibility, wasn’t it? Any given series of events, any shift in the world’s ceaseless tide, would have taken him here—if not in this flat, on this street, in this country, then some other place in some other time where he could hold the face of Sherlock Holmes between his hands and think _I love him, and now that I know, now that I know this fire in me burns at his behest, I will keep it kindled for the rest of my days._

He was a romantic, yes, but a romantic with dignity. Perhaps years down the road, he would write that down and give it to Sherlock on a stationary printed with the pattern of their wallpaper.

 _Years down the road_. Because that was where they were going, wasn’t it? John Watson and Sherlock Holmes against the world, running through the mucked-up back alleys of London until their feet were no longer able to carry them and their larger-than-life souls.

“Dad!”

John was up in an instant, the sound of Rosie’s voice dragging out an unnameable instinct he hadn’t known to live within him.

“Da—Sherlock!”

Oh.

Oh that—

John wasn’t—

A hand, calloused and strong, wrapped around his wrist and dragged him toward Sherlock’s old room, which he’d since given up for Rosie’s comfort. It _had_ meant that Sherlock was currently camped out on John’s floor, but he hoped to change that tonight.

“You’re a good father,” Sherlock said. “Let’s not ruin that by standing around like a half-wit, yes?”

“She called you—”

“We’re not going to talk about that right now. Mainly because I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Ah, yes, this was the man that had had a grand malfunction when referred to as someone’s best friend. This wasn’t a good reaction; this was the absence of _a_ reaction. Whether that was better or worse had yet to be determined.

“Rosie,” John called as they came into the room, “what’s wrong?”

“Is Sher—” Rosie caught sight of the man she’d wanted to see, and her lip began a great wobble in her effort to hold back tears. She was out of her bed in an instant, throwing herself at Sherlock’s legs and holding on like a frightened koala.

Sherlock shared John’s worry when their eyes met, but he was soon too occupied with Rosie to take part in wordless conversation. “Rosie,” he said in that voice that was always drawn out by the small girl, “do you wish to tell me what’s happened?”

“I thought— You were—” Rosie’s voice, wet with tears, was near-incomprehensible, but John had made sure he was learned when it came to his daughter, and this would be no exception. “I had a bad dream, and I thought you were . . . hurt.”

“You thought I died.”

John wanted to snap at him for being so blunt, but he seemed to know how to work this better than John himself; Rosie nodded at the clarification of her words, burying her face into Sherlock’s thighs and leaving damp spots with her tears.

“You called me ‘Dad,’” he said softly, reverently, petting back her hair. “Did you know you did that?”

Rosie pulled away, glad for the distraction from her nightmare. “’M sorry, Sherlock, didn’t mean—”

“I don’t mind, Rosie. Not at all. And your Pa doesn’t mind either.”

Sherlock didn’t need to look up to check with John. Of course he didn’t. They were _them_.

_I was also just sat in his lap. I think one of those things takes precedence._

“Is . . . Is that okay? If I call you that?”

Stars danced their stage play in Sherlock’s eyes, not eternal but burning their brightest until they drew their last. Diamonds of the highest quality clung to the satiny, dark fringe of his lashes. “I should think myself quite honoured if you did.”

Rosie reached up and gripped onto Sherlock’s fingers, and— _God_ , she _was_ small, wasn’t she? It was hard to remember that when she was bounding through the flat with a smile that made the sun look like it was flickering out, but she was; she was small.

She was a child, and she’d been born to two broken people who hadn’t quite learned to fit together in time—and what did that mean, _in time?_ He didn’t know. _Now_ , she was meant to be raised by two people who were more broken.

But he didn’t think that was this story’s end.

More broken, yes, but in their brokenness, they fit together perfectly. Every time they shattered it was hard to forget that singing completion that swept him off his feet when they came back together, entwined in ease and loveliness.

“Will you promise to be safe?” Rosie asked Sherlock. “Everyone at school always tells me I have cool parents or weird parents or—or—or whatever it is that they say, but I don’t care about what they think. I just really, really, _really,_ ” Rosie sobbed out, reaching with her other hand to take John’s, “want you both here. With me. I don’t want to be alone. _Please_ don’t leave me alone.”

John was wrapped his entire body around her before he could think. These were not wounds he could protect her from, these little cuts in her heart that would never heal with anything save time, but he could try his best to take the hurt from her, undo whatever it was he’d shown her to make her fear this biting loneliness. He’d done this, hadn’t he? This was why broken people did not try to raise other people, because then parts of them inevitably broke in the fumbling that happened along the way.

“Rosie, can you feel that?”

John cracked an eye open, unsure of when they’d slipped shut, and watched as Sherlock, having knelt down, pressed Rosie’s palm to his chest.

“You feel that, don’t you?”

John felt Rosie nod.

“Every beat is for you and your father. You know that, no?”

Slower, though no less sure, Rosie nodded again.

“Good. Because it’s true. You and your father are the purest goods in my life, and I will always protect you.”

He’d heard this vow once, and it had been both salvation for his soul and poison in his lungs depending on when he’d thought about it. Now, it was a salve on his burns and cuts and gunshot wounds; it was beautiful in that it soothed Rosie as well, for he felt her relax against them, drained from her emotional expenses and ready for bed once more.

John was happy to hoist her back up.

Rosie received two kisses, one on each temple from two different pairs of lips, before she was allowed to sleep in peace.

In the kitchen, up against the spot where the coffee maker had once made a short stop in its trek across the counter, John stopped Sherlock before the latter could get too far.

“You’re so good with her.”

“You’re no different, John.”

“Debatable, that.” John swallowed. _Words, you buffoon. Come on, they’re not hard!_ “I just mean that—I’m glad. That you’re good with her. Because I can’t— I don’t want— Living without either of you isn’t an option, I’m afraid.”

That had always been true. It was just the ease with which he accepted it that had occasionally come into question. But not anymore, because Sherlock balanced him out—the hot air the rose when the cold air dropped, the promise of smoke when fire seared the ground, the moon that sometimes hung around during the day to banter with the sun.

“She’s a Watson,” Sherlock whispered, bracing his hands on John’s hips. “More so than that, she’s your daughter. Loving her is easy to me.”

“She called you ‘Dad,’” John said, smitten with the man before him and every inch of his unfairly warm chest that hid beneath two layers of fabric. The thought lit up his mind like faerie lights on an over-powered circuit.

“She . . .” Sherlock grinned, pressing it into John’s hair. God have mercy, why hadn’t they been doing this the whole _damn time?_ “She did, didn’t she?”

“I guess that was inevitable. Probably it was going to lead to some severe identity crisis if we didn’t get on that right away.”

Sherlock’s chest jumped in a short laugh. “Is that so?”

“Sure. ‘Hey, Rosie, can you ask your parents if I can come over?’ ‘Sure! But, uh, mum’s dead and I have one and a half dads.’ ‘One and a half?’ ‘Oh, yes, haven’t you heard? John Watson—that’s the full dad, you’ve seen him around here—and Sherlock Holmes. He’s the half, but I think you got that. How do you feel about Easter egg hunts, but instead of finding chocolate, you find clues to a murder my half-dad solved before I was born? Winner gets enameled eyeballs!’ ‘Right . . . Forget I asked.’ Then the poor girl comes home thinking it was the _half-dad_ thing that’s scared off her friend because _you_ have trained her to want enameled eyeballs.”

Sherlock was trying to control full-bodied laughs and failing entirely, loosing his chortles and snorts into John’s shoulder. “I’ll have to try that next Easter,” he said between gasps.

“You most certainly will not.”

Sherlock, master musician though he was, never made a more beautiful sound than when he was laughing. It was the melody of the wind on which birds flew, the tumble of the oceans as they crashed their percussive heartbeat against the shores. John wanted to bottle up that sound and take it everywhere with him, if not to loose it into the world and risk losing it, then to merely carry it around and know it was there.

“Are we bad for her, Sherlock?”

Sherlock needed no explanation. “John, we both had perfectly good parents. You want to know what happened to us? Let’s make a list. The Holmeses: three emotionally stunted children, varying in occupation from government official to consulting detective to loosely insane criminal mastermind; The Watsons: two slightly damaged children, one being an adrenaline-addicted, veteran soldier and the other an emotionally unavailable drunk.” He brushed his violinist’s fingers along John’s jaw, and within that touch was a world’s worth of fragility and strength both to be learned from and shared. “We will love her. We already do. And John, if she somehow becomes a terrible combination of all five of those things, we will work through it.”

“God, if she manages all five I’ll have to applaud her determination alone.”

Sherlock took that chance to kiss John’s brow.

“Nope. No, no, if you’re going to use your lips, use them correctly.”

“I seem to recall you pressing your face against mine not ten minutes before when _you_ could have kissed _me_.”

“Are you going to focus on the semantics or are you going to kiss me?”

And when they did kiss, it was soft and sky-brightening and invigorating, leaving invisible nicks in their lips as they brushed along the other’s jagged edges that had not yet eroded with time—but it was okay, because they were not strangers to pain, and they were not oblivious to how the world spun on that searing, inescapable hurt. But they could, in their own little rebellion, press hands against chests that housed invisible shrapnel, slip them under shirts and coats where both marred and unblemished skin resided, using every bit of desperation from years of _maybes_ and _stop its_ and _whys_ as fuel. In his mind’s eye, he could see Sherlock under the low lights of 221B’s kitchen shining down on them like their own recreation of the moon, the dips of his cheeks like pieces of the Earth that a deity of the sky had wanted to keep for themselves.

John understood that; he understood wanting to keep piece of Sherlock, however he could—

because here, together, like this, meant being broken was not the scariest thing in the world.

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to yell at me on [tumblr](https://i-just-like-books-man.tumblr.com)? Leave a request? I dunno do something or nothing, I don't own you. Hopefully you liked this little rambling of mine, though, because my season 4-brand suffering needs to be of use to SOMEONE


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